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Sunday, December 19, 2010

How a 2 Minute Experiment Added 729 Facebook Fans in 7 Days

Published on December 19th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

About the Author

Mitchell is the co-founder of BigCommerce. He has been selling online and building web-based software for close to 10 years. Mitch is passionate about teaching business owners how to build long lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with your customers and clients via his YouTube guru channel which has had 500,000 views.

Last week I mentioned that we wanted to promote your BigCommerce store to 70,000+ people on our blog. Today I’ll do just that for 3 randomly selected clients, but first I want to share some numbers around this little experiment we’ve been conducting over the last 7 days.

One thing that’s hard to pinpoint is exactly how much value a Facebook fan brings to a business, and whether the virality of Facebook works as well for B2B as it does for B2C. Facebook has their Insights tool for administrators of fan pages, but the stats it provides are basic.

You can mesh these with Google Analyitcs to track bounce and conversion rates, but even then you really don’t know exactly a) how the person became a fan on Facebook and b) what specifically lead them from Facebook to your website.

At the moment social media marketing (Facebook and Twitter) is like Google AdWords (and Overture, etc) when it first came out. It’s still fairly new and a bit hard to figure out but you know it works and you know it has to be part of your marketing mix. Our little experiment attracted 729 new Facebook followers to our fan page in 7 days, bringing our total to just over 3,200 fans.

You can see the results in the chart below:

You can also see that visits to our actual Facebook page surged too:

I think the our little experiment worked quite well. 729 new fans in 7 days is nothing to sneeze at. Here are the 3 BigCommerce stores that were randomly selected out of those who participated in spreading the word. A big thank you to everyone who made this experiment a success!